Browse "History"

The importance of Beringia is twofold: it provided a pathway for intercontinental exchanges of plants and animals during glacial periods and for interoceanic exchanges during interglacials; it has been a centre of evolution and has supported apparently unique plant and animal communities.

As we mark the 200th anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald’s birth on 11 January 2015, it’s worth considering his achievements, experiences and his flaws.

This neologistic term came into public consciousness with the appointment of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963. On examining its terms of reference the commission could not find the word in a dictionary.

Billion Dollar Gift, the Canadian government's first comprehensive attempt to help finance Britain's war effort during the Second World War. Canada's war production, and its wartime prosperity, was dependent upon British orders, but Britain lacked gold and dollar reserves.

In early Canada, the enslavement of African peoples was a legal instrument that helped fuel colonial economic enterprise. Enslavement was introduced by French colonists in New France in the early 1600s, and lasted until it was abolished throughout British North America in 1834. During that two-century period, Canada was involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Within the country’s borders, people were bought, sold and enslaved. Canada was further linked to the institution of enslavement through international trade. The country exchanged products such as salted cod and timber for slave-produced goods such as rum, molasses, tobacco and sugar from slaveholding colonies in the Caribbean.

(See also Chloe Cooley and the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada; Underground Railroad; Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Slavery Abolition Act, 1833.)

Bloc populaire canadien, a Canadian federal and Québec provincial political movement formed September 1942 in reaction to the National Resources Mobilization Act, Amendment Act, 1942, which removed the existing ban on CONSCRIPTION for military service overseas.

Bloody Sunday was a violent confrontation between protesters and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Vancouver police in Vancouver on Sunday 19 June 1938.

Bluefish Caves contain the oldest undisturbed archaeological evidence in Canada.

The most famous ship in Canadian history, the Bluenose was both a fishing and racing vessel in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nova Scotia schooner achieved immortality when its image was engraved onto the Canadian dime.

In the 1880s, parts of Newfoundland's government and mercantile community felt that RECIPROCITY with the US would solve growing economic problems by providing new markets for dried cod.

Bourgeois, according to an 18th-century writer, were not nobles, ecclesiastics or magistrates, but city dwellers who "nevertheless by their properties, by their riches, by the honorable employments which adorn them and by their commerce are above the artisans and what is called the people.

Boyd's Cove, in eastern Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland, has been occupied intermittently for about 2,000 years. Beothuk pit houses dating from the late 17th or the early 18th century have yielded stone tools lying nearby European artifacts.

In the 1980s archaeological work began on a Beothuk site at Boyd's Cove. This site dates from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and is of particular interest as it shows some of the adaptations of the Beothuk to trading contacts with European fishermen.

Brandy Parliament, an assembly of 20 notables of New France, who on 10 October 1678 were asked their opinion of the sale of brandy to the Indigenous peoples. The title was bestowed in 1921 by historian W.B. Munro.

Breadalbane is a ghost ship, a three-masted barque lying beneath the ice of the Northwest Passage. It is the world's northernmost known shipwreck and the best-preserved wooden ship yet found in the ocean.

Before the Second World War, the British government was anxious to acquire new, secure sources for weapons production. The Canadian government was reluctant to co-operate, fearing isolationist opinion, especially in Québec.

British American Land Company, chartered 20 March 1834 and promoted by John Galt, Canada Company founder; Edward Ellice, Lower Canada's largest absentee landowner; and others. It purchased 343 995 ha of crown land in the Eastern Townships (Qué) for £120 000.

British Columbia joined Confederation on 20 July 1871, becoming Canada’s sixth province in the wake of a the Fraser River Gold Rush and on the promise of a transcontinental railway link.

Four decades later, in 1859, 4 women - regarded as social visionaries of the day - were poised to do just that, setting up refuges in London and Liverpool which were, in effect, way stations from which the children were shipped across the sea to the supposed bright promises of Canada.